joost witteveen <joostje@mail.com> writes:
> First of all: If you try "LC_ALL=eo update-menus" as root,
> you'll see that menu already supports internationalisation, in a
> way that doesn't have to disadvantages described below.
No, that doesn't work. It makes the Gnome menu entries for the
default ("C") locale be the "eo" entries. And if I change the locale
within Gnome, the menu items don't change. That's a major bug. I
said l10n, not i18n because I meant l10n not i18n.
We already have people complaining, and asking us to switch to the
Gnome menu system because of this problem. Especially admins with
several users. (Yes, they could run update-menus as user, but that
has its own *major* disadvantages.)
> Yes, what you tried works. But it has several disadvantages.
None of which are as big as the disadvantages of the current
approach. I'm aware of the current approach, but it's not good
enough.
The disadvantages to my approach are all (or almost all) logistical;
the disadvantages to the current approach are technical. There are
many ways to deal with logistical problems, but the only way to deal
with a technical problem is to fix it.
The Gnome project seems to have managed to get translations into
individual packages, and, while it's not as big as Debian, it's still
pretty big.
The current approach *is* good for an interim measure -- we can
collect the translations in a central place for now, and later get
them added to individual packages. But the current approach is
majorly broken with respect to both Gnome and KDE, and, while I don't
use either of those systems, I suspect that the majority of our users
*will* be using one or the other before long. We should prepare
ourselves to do it right before too much longer.
The fact that my proposal won't help fvwm, which I happen to use, is a
side issue. (And probably means that we should keep the current
system even if we *also* use something like what I proposed.) :-)
--
Chris Waters xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
or xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr | this .signature file.